Posts About Colour Inspiration

Re-focussing Chez Plum

Published on June 19, 2016November 4, 2016 by spunplumLeave a comment

A lot of things have been happening in my little spinning and yarn world over the last few months. The biggest one, for me personally at least, is that I got more focussed about my colours.

When you sell on Etsy, you receive a lot of tips about improving your shop and there is a lot of talk about branding, which is something that is foreign and which I’d rather not think about. But then I discovered a really beautiful brand of hand-dyed yarns from Canada. I came across them by accident through a knitter whom I follow on Instagram and I was inspired by their colours and the simple elegance of their land and sea colour inspiration. They’re called Lichen and Lace and at some point I will treat myself to a lot of their yarn.

Aren’t these lovely? Screenshot from Lichen and Lace website

This got me thinking about what really inspires my colours. Since my yarns are all one-offs, my dyeing until now was usually a case of throwing around colours in whatever way I fancied. I named my yarns after towns and places, but my associations were sometimes loose and after the fact. So I decided to get back to basics and think about what has always inspired me.

The answer was pretty simple. Landscapes. And I’ve even blogged about them before (see Landscape Yarns, and More Grey Sheep Love: Spinning with Gotland)

Handpainted merino fleece handspun single on the bobbin — Spinning my first landscape yarn, which is now in the stash of my dear friend Ashley, mitten knitter extraordinaire.

I’ve always gotten a bit annoyed at people who turn crafts into long-winded academic exercises. I don’t think that dyeing or spinning are academic and I’m not trying to swing things in that direction. However, sometimes it’s nice to make the simple act of adding dye to wool into something a bit more personal.

Back in my previous life as an experimental film student I was inspired by the wonderful Canadian artist Joyce Wieland.

2014-04-15 — Joyce Wieland “Reason Over Passion” film still, 1968

I loved her for so many reasons: her take on feminism, her promotion of traditional crafts, her Canadian patriotism… But more relevantly, she talked about landscape and how Canadians are affected by their sense of landscape.

8ca3e88d29712c991239f360d94e6f1a — Joyce’s and Michael Snow’s geese still fly in the Toronto Eaton Centre.

So to get back to yarn: I decided to refocus all my dying and colours on landscapes. And since I live in Scotland, where beautiful landscape, both urban and rural, is abundant, this has not proved to be a problem.

IMG_20160602_183817 — Scotland, you are just so amazingly beautiful. I took this at the top of Conic Hill, overlooking Loch Lomond

Above are early morning chimney pots from the window of the flat I stayed in the first time I came to Glasgow a few years ago. Beside is its corresponding yarn, a thread-plied thick and thin merino.

Below is a lovely street in Barcelona where I stayed last month, making me want to dye everything blue, pink and green (although you can’t see the lovely green building in this photo).

I’ve started saving pictures of landscape inspiration, and I found that I’ve started to enjoy dyeing more because I’m actually aiming for specific results. I don’t know how much people who buy yarn care about where the inspiration for colours comes from, but for me, it makes it more enjoyable.

Grey and Spray

Published on December 6, 2015December 31, 2015 by spunplum1 Comment

After the business of preparing to move house and going on holiday I’m finally finding time to wrap up my trio of posts about grey sheep and dying their wool. For a refresher on earlier grey sheep adventures check out Beginning Adventures with Grey Sheep and More Grey Sheep Love: Spinning with Gotland.

In my previous post, I talked about spinning up some grey Gotland top into a lace-weight single. This time I’ll talk about spray dying it before plying, and also dying and spinning up a mid-grey Massam top.

Spray dying is fun and can be easily done outside, which is how I like to work. Even in the rain, you can get a good dye job done, and I love feeling like the fresh air and the crisp Northern England damp are spun into my yarn. It’s a little bit unpredictable, but since dying grey fleece is a bit unpredictable anyways, I don’t have a problem with this.

Just like with handpainting and dying, I always start with a good long soak in vinegar and water.

Pictured above is my Gotland single and my Massam top, bathing in vinegar and coordinating nicely with the slate gravel in my back garden.

Once the items have soaked for a good half hour to 45 minutes I hang them out on the washing line. It’s good to let them drip for a little bit before applying the dye so that all of the dye doesn’t drip away.

DSCF3082 — Wool in the garden, after being sprayed

With skeins I start spraying at the top and let the dye soak in and drip down before spraying in further down. With top, since it’s sort of slung over the line I concentrate the dye at the bottom of the loops and then work my way up.

After applying the dye, I let it sit on the wool for about 45 minutes and then I carefully wrap it up in long sausages of cling film or plastic wrap, pop it into Ziploc bags, and steam it in a colander on the stove for about 45 minutes. Then I let it cool a bit outside before unwrapping it into a sink of warm water, and letting any excess dye rinse away.

The thing about spraying when the wool is hanging is that you can’t separate the strands of yarn or fibres like you can when handpainting in a tray. With grey fleece it’s even more of a gamble because when wet, it’s so dark that it’s hard to tell where the colour is going. My Gotland single was a complete mystery until it had been rinsed and dyed.

DSCF3078 — The grey Gotland single looking like a tangled mess. As it hangs and drips, it takes on a very light-coloured halo that makes identifying the colours very difficult.

So on that note, I’ll talk more about the individual pieces that I dyed this time. The Gotland single was a lovely soft grey all on its own. However, I always intended on dying it as the next in my series of landscape-inspired yarns (for more on that, check out Landscape Yarns). The colours were inspired by my drives through the Scottish Borders region. I sprayed the skein with some olive green, a bit of yellow, and a dark forest green, and then dribbled on some of a terracotta colour from a squeeze bottle.

The result was just as I had hoped, and captures the shifting greens and earthiness of the views from my drives down the M74 motorway.

I should have left it as it was, but I went ahead with the original plan and chain plied it into a DK weight yarn. The result is pleasant and almost looks like a tweed yarn, but I think I prefer it the way it was as a single. It was a good experiment, but I have some regrets, and I feel like the more dramatic colour shifts that I liked in the single were lost in the plying.

The Massam top which I dyed the same day was my first time working with this breed of fleece. In many ways it’s a lot like Gotland, but it’s a British sheep from the north, originally bred from a cross between Wensleydale and Swaledale breeds. It’s soft, with long staples and a lovely halo.

DSCF3067 — Massam top, showing off it’s lovely lustre and soft grey

Spray dying this was very quick. With the natural grey as the base, I only used one main dye, and a few dribbles of a darker contrast blue and let the dripping of the wet top do the blending of colour for me. I wanted to leave quite a bit of the grey showing since in the past I’ve gotten carried away with the spray bottles and the resulting top hasn’t had very much variegation.

Above is the wet, dyed top, hanging on the line. Below it’s all dried and fluffy.

Spinning it was a proper pleasure because of the long staples and soft, lightweight texture. I decided to leave it as a single because I was pleased with how the variation in blues turned out.

And that concludes my grey-sheep adventures so far. Next I’m moving on to some lovely brown French merino and a lot of undyed raw alpaca fleece!

Please credit spunplum.wordpress.com if sharing any images.

Landscape Yarns

Published on October 20, 2015November 4, 2016 by spunplum2 Comments

I’ve recently completed a couple of yarns inspired by familiar and favourite landscapes and am thinking of making a whole series specifically dedicated to the landscapes in my life. I used to be really fascinated with landscapes when I was in art school (a very long time ago!) and I’ve been remembering this a lot lately, as I’ve also been doing a great deal of driving along the edges of the stunning Scottish Borders and Northern Pennine regions in the UK. Both are open and vast with beautiful variations in natural colours.

The northern Scottish Border region, near the town of Biggar, taken by me on a very windy hike.

Here are my landscape yarns so far, based on two other favourite landscapes:

This one was inspired by early summer on the North York Moors in Yorkshire, when the heather is starting to bloom, but the moors are still very barren and red. It’s a beautiful expanse of empty and dramatic land with distant sea views. When I first moved to the UK, I remember driving through this region with a friend, and stopping by the road side to stand quietly together and look at the view.

SONY DSC — Heather blooming on The North York Moors National Park, photo credit http://www.walkingenglishman.com (also a fab website for finding walks all over these beautiful places!)

This is a single that I spun from hand painted locks of merino cross fleece from Clive the pet sheep. It’s mostly sock weight, but was spun directly from the locks, so it’s textured and a bit thick and thin in places.

This was my first time painting locks, as I usually kettle dye them, or paint the yarn after its spun. It was very successful though, and there was much less blending of colours than I thought, so the yarn maintains the dyed variegation of the fleece, and some of the natural white comes through.

My other landscape yarn was spun from handpainted merino top. I like how dense merino top is, and how when you paint it gently, the colours maintain a brightness from the white fleece in the middle that the dye doesn’t reach. I dyed this to be turned into a self striping yarn. It was based on the landscape of my childhood: a basic combination of lake and trees and sky, translucent blues and variations of greens.

F1030022 — An old photo, taken many years ago at my favourite lake

I used three shades of green and one shade of blue on the top. I had hoped for a bit more variation in the blue, but I’m pleased with the translucency of the colour.